“A Screenwriter Shoots His Own Unproduced Scripts, With a Gun”

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Scott Myers of Go Into The Story

Yesterday I featured a guest column from screenwriter Justin Marks in the Hollywood Reporter. For those of you outside the Hollywood system, Justin offers a nice glimpse of what it’s like to be a working screenwriter.

Here’s the bottom line: Getting a movie made is hard. Really hard. A vast majority of scripted projects do not get produced. That is reflected in most screenwriters’ resumes. That small stack of scripts? Those are the ones that get made. That big ass stack of scripts? Those are the ones that don’t get made.

Case in point: Tom Benedek. When I broke into the business in 1987, Tom had already been plying his trade as a screenwriter for several years. We are talking about a career three decades long. In that time, Tom has three official writing credits: Cocoon (1985), The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996), and Zeus and Roxanne (1997).

Three movies. During that time, Tom has worked on projects with Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, Harold Ramis, Lauren Schuler Donner and Richard Donner, Ray Stark, Brian Grazer, Working Title, Jersey Title, Jersey Film, Chris Blackwell, and others, all on projects that never made it to production.

That’s a lot of scripts.

So one day, Tom was looking at these boxes and boxes of his scripts and… well, here’s a NYT article that fills us in:

In the dim light of a shooting range, a figure clad in black baggy trousers and a black T-shirt is carefully loading a .45-caliber pistol. He adjusts his glasses, plants his feet and aims straight ahead.

Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Five ear-splitting cracks ring through the cavern, and a flurry of paper – like tiny white feathers – wafts to the floor.

“That’s ‘Ivory Joe,’ ” says the screenwriter Tom Benedek, who has just pumped bullets into one of his 22 unproduced scripts. “It’s a rewrite of an adaptation I did after ‘Free Willy’ for Lauren Shuler Donner,” he adds, referring to a well-known producer. “A romantic comedy-drama.”

Many a Hollywood screenwriter has bemoaned the brutal Darwinism of the movie business, has felt the dull pain of too many pages and too many years of orphaned work unproduced and unrecognized. Few, however, have found the path of catharsis and creativity discovered by Mr. Benedek.

Having shot the “Ivory Joe” script, which he wrote in 1992, Mr. Benedek will make it into a bronze sculpture, or take photographs with a special camera for striking jumbo prints. He will show these and other pieces this month in an exhibition at the Frank Pictures gallery in Santa Monica titled “Shot by the Writer – Works on Paper: 1982-2004.”

Here are some examples of Tom’s art:

Every Hollywood screenwriter learns to cope with loss and rejection. It comes with the territory. In Tom’s case, he turned his ‘dead’ scripts into art… in a unique way.

Takeaway: You need to be a survivor to make it as a Hollywood writer. The wins are great. The highs are awesome. But more often than not, you confront valleys, dry spells, and flat-out failures.

Prepare yourself now for the inevitable ups… and downs.

For the rest of the NYT article on Tom Benedek, go here.

1,827

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Scott Myers of Go Into The Story

1,827. That’s how many consecutive days I’ve posted on the blog. Or to put it another way…

Today is Go Into The Story’s 5th birthday!

As a reminder, here is what I posted on Day 1 of this blog:

The story behind Go Into The Story

Awhile back the night before I started writing my next screenplay, on a whim I asked my three-year-old son if he had any advice. He looked at me with his huge blue eyes and without hesitation said, “Go into the story, and find the animals.” I laughed — pretty funny. Over time, however, I’ve discovered wisdom in my son’s words. As writers, we do, indeed, go into the stories we create. And the animals? How about characters, plot, theme, dialogue, subtext, and all those other mysterious, magical creatures prowling in the jungle of our imaginations?

I’ve been an online instructor through UCLA Extension Writer’s Program since 2002. This blog is largely in response to students who wanted to continue our conversations about the creative process. I offer it as a resource to them and any other aspiring writer, especially those interested in screenwriting and the magic of movies.

So let’s go into the story… and find the animals!

Scott
May 16, 2008

If you like what we do around here, I would love to hear from you.

Onward and upward!

“My Life as a Screenwriter You’ve Never Heard Of”

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Scott Myers of Go Into The Story

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Justin Marks has written over 20 movie screenplays and seen his TV pilots greenlit — but as he explains, the life of a Hollywood scribe is far more lows than highs if your name isn’t Aaron Sorkin.

An excerpt:

Here’s a day in the life of a writer that you don’t always get to hear about.

It was 5 p.m., and I was playing Call of Duty. Why? Because I wanted to. The phone rang; it was a producer with whom I’d just spent the past two years laboring over a cable pilot, a time-travelly science fiction thing. We’d delivered the final cut to the network, and we were awaiting The Call — the one where you hear that your show, which tested well, is being picked up, that your life is about to change.

But the producer had That Voice. Any experienced writer knows That Voice. Because That Voice means one thing: The network passed. “Hey,” the producer said, “we fought for it till the end. We’ll find something else.” I agreed. And that was that.

Probably not three minutes had elapsed in my game of Call of Duty. Two more minutes to go upstairs and erase my now-dead pilot’s name off the list of projects on my dry-erase board. Two years of effort gone in five minutes.

As I wiped the board clean, I saw another project listed below. Kind of a back-burner thing — I was busy at the time — but I owed the producer a call. So I picked up the phone. Told him I was in. By the next morning, I was back at the keyboard, as if yesterday’s pilot had never happened.

And that, my friends, is what it means to be Just Another Working screenwriter.

This is true on so many levels. For every Sorkin, Zaillian, or Lindelof, there are dozens and dozens of hard-working, talented screenwriters who sell specs and pitches, and land open writing assignments, but have scant actual movie credits to their name.

Why? Because it is damn hard to get a movie made.

I don’t want to distract from Justin’s honest, evocative article, so I’ll leave it at that today. But tomorrow, I’ll post about a unique way that one screenwriter has dealt with all of his unproduced screenplays.

For more of Justin’s guest column, go here.

Also please note: I will be running an interview with Justin the week of May 27th. It’s terrific so you won’t want to miss it.

Hot Topics: The Black Board

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Scott Myers of Go Into The Story

A weekly update from Shaula Evans, moderator of The Black Board:

With everyone counting down to the opening of the Quest for submissions, I want to remind you that The Black Board offers some great resources on generating story ideas and you’re welcome to come work on your entries in our Logline Workshop!

With the Quest on everyone’s minds, it’s no surprise that this week The Black Board has been full of discussions about theme and strategy:

Francis Ford Coppola on Theme

Theme as a Statement of Value

How explicit should theme be?

How do you find your story?

Is every story you write personal?

here’s more than one door into screenwriting

How do you choose what to work on next?

Plus a five-part series about what makes your script hard or easy to sell:

Part 1: Filmmaking is a business

Part 2: Genre Considerations

Part 3: Budget Considerations

Part 4: Spec as Writing Sample

Part 5: What does this mean for your next spec?

And here’s your Idea Factory bonus link: characters who come back from the dead!